?I stayed in the shower for a very long time. The night before was right inside my skin; no matter how hard I scrubbed, I still caught the stench of stale booze, stale hash, garden earth. Finally I gave up and just stood there with the water turned up as hard and as hot as it would go, letting it hammer down on my head.
Now that I was on my own the stoneover had rushed back up, a nasty mishmash of physical and mental, all-consuming sapping despair and a sense of doom that seemed to come not from my mind but from deep inside my stomach and my spine. Melissa had been right all along, going after answers was the stupidest thing I could possibly have done, and now it was too late.
Part of me was still clinging to the slim chance that I had got it all wrong, and if I could just clear my head I would be able to figure out the real story. No matter how hard I scrabbled, though, every trail looped me around to the same place: me with the hoodie, me the only one who could have had the key to let Dominic in, me the only one for whom he would have come when he was called (Hey dude got a couple of lines, I owe you, want to come over sometime?), me not in my room that night. And, starker than any of that: who else could it have been? Susanna and Leon both thought it had been me. Hugo: not a chance. There had been no one else in the house. Of course Dominic could have swiped the key and cunningly brought in his own garrote, and his own murderer, but even in my desperation that seemed a tad implausible and there I was again, looping back around to that same nightmare place.
I had nothing to fight it off with. The only counter-arguments were that I didn’t remember it and that I wasn’t that kind of guy, and how much were those worth? In court maybe, even probably—come on, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I know my client’s DNA was all over the garrote but look at him, such a nice blond boy from such a nice rich family, so handsome, never been in trouble in his life, does he seem like a killer to you; if I could do something about the eyelid-droop and keep the slur out of my voice, I might even get away with it. But here, with nothing but the merciless drum of water and the curling steam and the tortured squealing of the pipes, it was different. What was or wasn’t in my mind, what I thought I was: those were worthless.
Two hands to turn the key in the rusted lock, whispered Come on in dude and Dominic’s grin in a slash of moonlight. Bite of the garrote into flesh, choking sounds, feet scrabbling futilely in the dirt. The impossible weight of a body that had to be dragged across an endless expanse of grass, my own panting terrifyingly loud in my ears, hands slipping, darkness, frantic, I can’t do it— I had no idea which snippets were memory and which stemmed from some dark hallucinatory process deeper than imagination, involuntary and uncontrollable, simmering with a power and a reality all its own.
Every one of them felt like a violation: alien, lunatic, forced on me. How could I be thinking these things, me? I belonged in a different world, pints with the lads, smartly managed Twitter arguments, croissants in bed with Melissa on lazy rainy Sundays. It took me a while to figure out why the feeling was horribly familiar. I was still standing in the shower staring at nothing—had been standing there for probably half an hour, the water was going cold—when it came back to me: the bland-faced doctor droning away, my first day in the hospital, neurologist seizures occupational therapist like those had something to do with me; the slow terrible drop as I began to understand that they did, that this was my life now.
Eventually the water got cold enough that my teeth were chattering. I was drying off when I heard it: discreet rat-tat at the front door; a pause; and then Hugo’s even murmur, woven with another voice. The tone was easy and pleasant, no urgency there, but I knew that voice straight through walls and floors, would have known its lightest word anywhere, like a lover: Rafferty.
My legs almost went from under me. So soon. I had known it had to come someday but I had been expecting a few weeks, months, some idiot part of me had actually dared to hope I might get away with it. For a second I thought of doing a runner—Hugo would keep them talking, I could drop out a window and go over the back wall and— Even before I finished the thought I knew how ludicrous it was: and what, go off grid and live in a cave in the Wicklow Mountains? Instead I pulled on my clothes as fast as I could, fumbling buttons, at the very least I didn’t need to be shivering in my boxers when they came for me— Deny, I told myself, heading down the stairs in what felt like slow motion, so light-headed with terror and nausea and the strangeness of it all that I had to clutch the banister, deny deny deny and get a lawyer, they can’t prove anything . . .
Rafferty and Kerr and Hugo were in the hall. Their heads turned, sharply and simultaneously, towards me on the stairs. The detectives were dressed for autumn, long overcoats and Kerr had a hat that belonged on Al Capone; Hugo—I half-noticed it without being able to work out what it meant—had changed out of his pajamas and dressing gown, into sort-of-decent tweed trousers and a clean shirt and jumper. There was something unsettling in the way the three of them were arranged, standing apart, positioned precisely as chess pieces against the geometry of the floor tiles.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Toby,” Rafferty said—cheerily, completely at ease, as if the last time had never happened. “I like the haircut. Listen, your uncle’s going to come down to the station with us for a bit. Don’t worry, we’ll get him back to you safe and sound.”
“What?” I said, after a blank moment. “Why?”
“We need to take a statement,” Kerr said.
“But,” I said. I was confused. All three of them were looking at me as if I had walked in on some private transaction, a business deal, a drug deal, something where I was irrelevant and unwanted. “You can do that here.”
“Not this time,” Rafferty explained genially. “It varies.”
I didn’t get this; I didn’t like it. “He’s sick,” I said. “He’s got—”
“I know, yeah. We’ll take good care of him.”
“He’s been having seizures.”
“That’s good to know. We’ll keep an eye out.” To Hugo: “Do you need any medication for that?”
“I have it here,” Hugo said, touching his breast pocket.
“Hugo,” I said. “What’s going on?”
He pushed his hair off his forehead. It was brushed smooth; that and the good clothes gave its length a sudden ravaged elegance, famous conductor fallen on hard times. “I rang Detective Rafferty,” he said gently, “and explained to him that I was responsible for Dominic Ganly’s death.”
After a second of utter silence: “What the fuck,” I said.
“I should have done it weeks ago—well, obviously I should have done it years ago. But it would take a certain kind of person to do that, wouldn’t it, and apparently I’m not that kind; or wasn’t, anyway, until now.”
“Wait,” I said. “Hugo. What the fuck are you doing?”
He regarded me through his glasses, somberly, as if from an immense distance. “At this stage,” he explained, “it doesn’t feel like something I can keep to myself any longer. That seizure the other day, that was a bit of a wake-up call.”
Kerr was shifting his weight, wanting to get moving. “Remember,” Rafferty said, from where he had melted away to the sidelines, “you are not obliged to say anything unless you wish to do so, but anything you do say will be taken down in writing and may be given in evidence. You remember that, yeah?”
“I know,” Hugo said. He found his coat on the stand and started shouldering it on, awkwardly, shifting his cane from hand to hand.
“And you’re sure about the solicitor. Because I’m telling you now, you should have one for this.”
“I’m sure.”